The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [302]
“How much is that?” Bobby asked. It was a question that bored travelers had probably asked before, and the vendeuse gave him the answer that always drove them away, down the airport corridor. “A hundred dollars.”
“I’ll take it,” Bobby said. The gigantic dog could not even fit into the private plane without having its head unceremoniously removed. The weather was foul and the time was late, but Bobby insisted that the pilot fly back to Washington so that he could spend the night with his family at Hickory Hill. And so the plane soared north through the murky black skies, carrying Bobby and an enormous, beheaded stuffed dog.
All those weeks of the campaign, Jack’s father continued to work quietly for his son’s election. When Arthur Krock spoke unkindly about Jack’s candidacy, Joe shut the New York Times columnist out of the Kennedy lives forever. Krock had become a prickly near-reactionary, and Joe was not wrong in believing that the journalist changed to a softer lens when he turned to look at Nixon.
Joe had an understanding of the relationship between money and political power that was mercilessly realistic. From the time he had first worked for Roosevelt, he had understood that big contributors did not want passbook-size returns on their money, and that what they considered good for the country was often their own personal or corporate good writ large. Cash had no fingerprints on it, and in 1960 campaign laws were still loose enough that large amounts of untraceable money moved around Kennedy’s campaign, as it did in Nixon’s.
Joe told one of the aides to go pick up a valise full of money and to carry it to another destination in the campaign. The aide returned, confused. “You know, there was ten thousand less than you said,” he told the man whom they knew as “the Ambassador.”
“In politics, money does not grow in the passing,” Joe said, always the philosopher.
There has been much conjecture that the Kennedy patriarch made an unholy alliance with the mob to ensure Jack’s election. In these stories Sam Giancana shows up at all the crucial moments, a shadowy presence, his face barely visible. Exner has Giancana standing on the platform at Chicago’s Union Station waiting for her to arrive with a valise full of Kennedy money. Tina Sinatra has Joe asking her father to meet with Giancana to solicit his help. Tina says that Frank Sinatra met the Chicago mobster on a golf course, where he appealed to an undiscovered strain of patriotism in the pathological killer. “I believe in this man and I think he’s going to make us a good president,” Sinatra supposedly said, one good citizen to another. “With your help, I think we can work this out.”
A different story has Joe meeting the mobster the first time in the Chicago courtroom of Judge William J. Tuohy, where the two men conspired to subvert the election. Another story has Joe meeting Giancana, other Chicago Mafia figures, and the Los Angeles mobster Rosselli at Felix Young’s, a New York restaurant, while their bodyguards waited outside. In yet another scenario Joe met at the restaurant that day with an even more notorious array of mobsters that included Carlos Marcello, the New Orleans don.
Joe had contacts with the darkest part of American society. In June of that election year, he stayed at the Cal-Neva Hotel at Lake Tahoe, owned by mob interests. The FBI said later that, according to informants, he met there with “many gangsters with gambling interests and a deal was made which resulted in Peter Lawford, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and others obtaining a lucrative gambling establishment, the Cal-Neva Hotel.” This did not mean that Joe had brokered the deal, but Mafia interests owned the Cal-Neva Hotel, and it was an unlikely place for the candidate’s father to have chanced upon.
Joe was an immensely shrewd man who had for the most part kept his underworld connections quiet. Joe may well have met with individuals who had mob connections and asked for their help